Creatures of Habit
by thespeedfxrce
Summary: Queen of Pentacles — the card pulled upright reads: Practicality, Creature Comforts, Financial Security. Reversed it reads: Self-Centredness, Jealousy, Smothering. As fate would have it, all three daughters of the Ancient and Noble House of Black embody two each.


This story was written for the Eighth Round of the Seventh Season of the Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition. I'm writing as the Seeker for the Tutshill Tornados.

My task this round is as follows:

SEEKER: Queen of Pentacles — Upright: Practicality, Creature Comforts, Financial Security, Reversed: Self-Centredness, Jealousy, Smothering. I will be using both upright and reversed sides of the card.

Disclaimer: I don't own any part of the world J.K. Rowling has created. It's all hers, from Diagon Alley to Hogwarts to all the people living there.

Thanks to my team for betaing!

* * *

Creatures of Habit**  
Word Count: 1693**

The rich and powerful of the wizarding world are creatures of habit. The women in this world especially so. Tradition is ingrained in them from the day they are born, and their lives are sophisticatedly, and rather meticulously planned out until the day they are married to an auspicious match. From there, their lives are controlled by their husbands.

The eldest of three, Bellatrix Black burned with a white-hot fire that would be contained by no man. Passion that suffocated anything that dared to stand in her way left her untrainable and scorned by potential suitors, even with her status in the Ancient and Noble House of Black.

Andromeda Black was no stranger to attention and found herself under equal parts constant scrutiny and covetous admiration. Two years younger than Bellatrix, she was the only daughter primed and ready to carry on the Black bloodlines come graduation.

Young Narcissa Black was oblivious to her beauty that would surely surpass her sister's with age. The petite blonde was instead upset her elder sisters were being fit into beautiful gowns to show off to handsome suitors at grand balls while she was to study and wait her turn.

* * *

In a fortnight, the Annual Yule Ball would take place in the magnificent Malfoy Manor, and all three Black girls would attend. It was there that Andromeda would be expecting a proposal from Lucius Malfoy, as organized by her father and Abraxas Malfoy.

"Dromeda, you can not possibly be considering going through with this," Bella admonished. "Malfoy is not good enough for my darling younger sister. The blond hair." She sniggered from where she sat the 7th year's end of the Slytherin table. Andromeda and Narcissa, a fifth and first year respectively, were granted permission to sit at that end due in part of their positions in the Ancient and Noble House of Black, and partly because Bellatrix would not allow anyone to say otherwise.

Narcissa, who never dared to speak out of turn while in the company of those other than her sisters, just frowned at the insult towards her own hair color.

Andromeda merely rolled her eyes and pushed her breakfast plate away. "Do not push your feminist propaganda onto me simply because a man of stature and position in high society has asked for my hand and not yours."

"A _man_?" Bella gauffed, ignoring the looks from their fellow housemates. "Malfoy is closer in age to Narcissa than you." At the mention of the sole heir of the Malfoy fortune, the youngest Black perked up, and her pale cheeks burned pink, not that Andromeda noticed.

"Pish." Andromeda waved her hand dismissively and stood from the table. "Lucius is only nine months younger than me and four years older than Cissy; he is _hardly_ a child. And neither am I." The fifth-year Slytherin tossed her silky straight hair over her shoulder and made her way to her first class of the day.

Bellatrix was not one to be left without having the last word, but she allowed it, for now. Where Narcissa was eager to please and easy to manipulate, Andromeda was steel on the edges but despicably soft in the center. The reckoning for Mudbloods was coming, and Bella would stand on the frontlines. The youngest Black would find her place at her husband's side soon enough, and she would support the cause whole-heartedly. But the middle child in the Ancient and Noble House of Black did not burn with the smothering heat that the eldest did and the youngest tried to emulate. It was simply impractical for her not to.

Dromeda would learn, Bella vowed. As still innocent Cissy was. It was only a matter of when.

* * *

Andromeda was not one to mingle with the commoners and rarely spoke up in class. She didn't need to raise her hand and offer answers to her professors for her to be noticed during the day. Her flowing script pulled attention from her female counterparts and the occasional and well-timed flip of her hair drew the males' gazes.

It also drew the attention of one treasonously irritating Ravenclaw student in her joint Ravenclaw/Slytherin Potions class. Always within the top five in any given class, he had offered to tutor her multiple times over the years. Andromeda wasn't stupid. It wasn't attractive to men for her to be too smart, too outspoken, so she maintained an average grade in all of her courses.

Not that Edward Tonks understood the politics that went into the education of young Pureblood women in a society where his presence was only barely tolerated.

Professor Slughorn handed back their potions essays from their last in-class lab at the end of the class.

"You could be getting O's on those." Her mudblood potions partner waved his perfectly scored essay in her face with a grin. "We do all the practical work together, but you insist on barely getting above Satisfactory on all of your essays. I know you have got the brains for it, Dromeda."

"Andromeda," she enunciated her full name for him, not that he ever used it no matter how many times she threatened to hex him over it. "You don't know anything about me." She gathered her things with a haughty expression on her face and left Ted scrambling in her wake.

"You're named after a Greek princess who was rescued by the Demi-God Perseus, although I know you would never need anyone to save you. You are smarter than you let people think. You pretended to be disgusted at the anonymous chocolates covered quills I sent you for St Valentine's Day, but you ate every last one—"

Andromeda turned on her heel outside of the potions class and watched Ted try and ultimately fail to not bump into her, sending some of his papers fluttering to the floor.

"That was you?" she gasped.

He flushed a deep red that reached his ears and bent over to grab his things from the floor while she made no move to help.

"And the note, too? Did you write that?" Andromeda had kept the short note, a poem really, attached to the gift in her trunk to this day.

_I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,  
__or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.  
__I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,  
__in secret, between the shadow and the soul._

Although she did not think it possible, Ted was even redder when he stood back up to his full height next to her. "Actually that was Pablo Neruda. There is more to that poem, I could show you…" he let himself trail off as his hand went to his hair in a nervous tick. He did that often when he was around her. She knew of his little crush on her, but other than small conversations, she hardly gave him any room to feel anything for her. Right?

Andromeda narrowed her eyes and for the first time, really _looked_ at her potions partner. He was rather handsome. Straight blonde hair, bright blue ocean eyes, and a soft bump in an otherwise perfect nose that she knew he'd received from Cyprus Nott in third year when he'd asked her to the Winter Ball.

A grin slipped over her lips, and she sighed in mock disappointment. "Oh, I had hoped to meet the author of the piece… Maybe if you wrote me something as devastatingly beautiful, I may allow you to tutor me." She turned quickly away from him, not waiting for a response, and tried to steel her face to an impassive, if not minutely cruel expression, but the small, treasonous smile on her lips wouldn't ebb away.

* * *

Narcissa did not understand the threat of war. She thought of spun gold hair and periwinkle gowns and suitors at balls. The hostility of her eldest sister and the neutrality of her middle sister was lost to her.

Bella revered herself in her independence, and gave notice to no man's advances. Dromeda was bound to the duty of making up for Bella's insubordination. She would marry a man of high stature and reverence. Narcissa, in all her wealth, wanted _more_.

The jewels that lined her tailored robes, the carriages that made every appearance more magnificent than the last, only added fuel to her fire.

If there was anyone with a sapphire bluer than hers it would not stand. She would write to her father and mother and demand more. Her conniving nature was similar to her sister's.

She insisted it was positively embarrassing that the _halfblood_, new money tramp Melissa Gamp had a ruby necklace far larger and more extravagant than hers. It was tacky and clearly not goblin made, but she had one and Narcissa didn't. And that simply wouldn't stand.

While her father bowed to her every whim, her mother insisted that if her youngest daughter wished to receive a new string of diamonds every week, she would need to find a suitable husband with a rather large pocketbook.

As Narcissa watched her sister Andromeda leave her potions class grinning at a mudblood Hufflepuff, a treasonous plan formed in her head.

When Little Cissy Black wanted something, she got it.

* * *

"Have you given thought to what I said at breakfast, Andromeda?" Bellatrix took a sip from her goblet of pumpkin juice as she examined her younger sister. "Andromeda?" She snapped. "Are you even listening to me?"

The brunette shook her head and turned to her sister, banishing her thoughts as they raced around a certain set of blue eyes and bright blonde hair. "Of course, yes. What were you saying?"

"Honestly." Bella rolled her eyes. She glared around the room. "Have you seen Cissy?"

"Not since breakfast," she followed her elder sister's gaze. "I believe Lucius asked to see her, to discuss the Yule festivities, no doubt."

"Hmm," the wild, raven-haired girl took another sip from her pumpkin juice. "He has always been rather keen on her, hasn't he, Andromeda? Andromeda?"

The younger Black couldn't be bothered to think of the Malfoy heir and whatever business he had with Narcissa or why Bellatrix seemed to care so much. All she could think of was the poem she had found in a Muggle Poetry book in a dark corner of the library and the boy who dared send it to her.

* * *

_I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.  
__I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;  
__so I love you because I know no other way_


End file.
